My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value ) is the most important attribute. Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's squarely where the Neo landed for the good-but-cheap laptop category. My nephew is also my godson, and to kick off his computing journey, I thought I'd let him choose f...

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 today. My favourite thing about it is this note in the release announcement: Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor. There’s still more to be done: we’re working on developing and releasing models that provide many of the same capabilities as Opus at a lower cost. It's so refreshing to see an AI lab honestly describe a release as a minor incremental improvement over the previous model! Honesty seems to...

M1 M2 M3 L $T 2.0 $100 bills 0.12 $50 bills 0.22 $20 bills 0.05 $1, $2, $5, $10 bills + coin 3.0 Household demand deposits at commercial banks 0.4 Household demand deposits at credit unions + thrifts 3.4 Business + government + foreign demand deposits 5.3 Savings deposits — passbook + statement + online 4.0 Money market deposit accounts — MMDAs 1.0 Interest-bearing checking — NOW + ATS accounts ...

Welcome to May’s Interesting Links ! This month saw the Current conference in London with the usual 5k run , lots of familiar faces and friendly conversations—and plenty of excellent breakout sessions too. It seems live-tweeting conferences isn’t a thing any more, with only myself and Thomas Cooper seeming to post anything, but if you want you can go review the hashtag feed on BlueSky for some highlights of the conference. Welcome to May’s Interesting Links ! This month saw the...

The next few months will be a blur in the run-up to Local-First Conf and the Lab Day we’re hosting. All our teams are busy prepping the work they’d like to show, polishing features, planning demos. Yet despite the race to hit these milestones, we’ve also published a fresh round of lab notes. In this edition of the Dispatch, we have a handful of notes from the Patchwork team, plus a note about the technical & social design behind Tenfold. Patchwork Lab Notes Are Back Patchwork is our ...

At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience - a format I refer to as “two old geezers on a park bench”. We talk about our experiences with LLM-augmented programming (at that point - October 2025), we show our frustration that things we’ve been saying for thirty years still need to be said, we say how anything like a manifesto reunion needs to be led by a younger generation, and opine on what jun...

The trigonometric Fourier series is a beautiful mathematical theory that shows how to decompose a periodic function into an infinite sum of sinusoids. These are my notes on the subject, with some examples and the connection to linear algebra in Hilbert space. Coefficients of Fourier series Let’s assume that is a well-behaved 2L -periodic [1] function and that we can find coefficients a_n and b_n such that: \[f(x)=\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\left(a_n cos\frac{n\pi x}{L}+b_n sin\frac{...

The technical paper for the Erdős Unit Distance Problem lists only "OpenAI" as an author. When Bill posted on Sunday about the Erdős distance problems, he mentioned the names of OpenAI researchers who prompted and checked the proof. Sebastien Bubeck of OpenAI reached out directly and later as a comment saying this was really an OpenAI-wide achievement, and we shouldn't just single out people at the end of the funnel. I agree with Bubeck for this paper, but it brings up some challenging ...

In the high-stakes environment of online gaming, the term “cashback” is frequently misunderstood as little more than a marketing gimmick—a minor consolation prize designed to keep a player’s account active after a difficult session. This perception, while common, misses the fundamental utility of the mechanic. When analyzed through the lens of bankroll management and risk mitigation, cashback functions not as a bonus, but as a critical safety valve. It is a mathematica...

Hello, It has been some time, and we're happy to share some news with you today. 2.1 plan We have been working on the major 2.1 update for Factorio and Space age for the last 8 months, and it has been shaping up quite well. Scope and expectations Generally, we are happy with the game design of Factorio and Space age. The progression is good, things are mostly well balanced (one or two exceptions), and there isn't anything we feel is majorly missing. That is to say, we d...

Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem. We’ve looked at a variety of construction productivity metrics , both for the US and for countries around the world, and found that construction productivity almost always rises much less in construction than it does in industries like manufacturing; often, it doesn’t improve at all. We’ve analyzed trends in construction costs in the US and around the world, and noted that constru...

This is going to come as a shock—a SHOCK —to some of you, but I harboured a not insignificant obsession with liners when I was a teenager, both of the ocean and air kind. I loved reading about commercial ships and planes of yore, learning about how they were operated, and contrasting them to how we get around today. Some of my favourite tomes were technical reference manuals and so-called “coffee table” books that explored these incredible machines. You could keep your books on cars and...

Cadey What is an operating system, really? Aoi I mean, isn't it obvious? It's something like FreeBSD or Fedora that has a kernel, userspace, graphics stack, core set of programs, and everything else you need to be able to use a computer. Is this a trick question? Numa Well it depends, is the Nintendo Switch OS an operating system? It doesn't have a shell in the same way FreeBSD does. Is SEL4 an OS? It doesn't ship with core utilities. Is Linux an OS? Is Windows an...

Warfare today is increasingly defined by systems that can operate on the edge. Interest in autonomy for unmanned systems continues to grow, particularly for capabilities such as GPS- and comms-denied operations, autonomous mission execution, and teaming across platforms.    While the case for autonomy is clear, committing to a larger autonomy effort upfront can still feel high-risk. Before deploying autonomy in the field, customers need proof that autonomy will work reliably on their own s...

I wanted the bootstrap process to be simple; ideally a single command and it would be up and running. But that’s not what we have right now; just look at this monstrosity from the previous post : helm install cilium cilium/cilium \ --namespace kube-system \ --version 1.19.2 \ --set kubeProxyReplacement=true \ --set k8sServiceHost=10.1.4.10 \ --set k8sServicePort=6443 \ --set l2announcements.enabled=true \ --set externalIPs.enabled=true \ --set gatewa...

Arrivals, Servers, and Utilization Three concepts underpin every queueing model. The first is Poisson arrivals : when customers arrive independently at a constant average rate $\lambda$, gaps between consecutive arrivals follow an exponential distribution with mean $1/\lambda$, and the count of arrivals in any window of width $t$ follows a Poisson distribution with mean $\lambda t$. These two descriptions are equivalent: if one holds, the other must too. The second key idea is that the ex...

Summary: People have tried extending rock-paper-scissors to more than 3 options, with some success. If you allow more pairings to be ties, this uncovers a rich garden of different game dynamics and strategies. As far as a battle of wits go, its hard to find a more balanced game than rock-paper-scissors. Its simplicity means that all strategy is scraped away, and all that’s left is to cold read the other person’s soul. Come, stare into my eyes, and I’ll see the weapon you’ll cho...

Where is your intelligence located? In your brain? It is a simplistic answer. A better model is that your intelligence is embodied. Consider a cook working at an expensive restaurant. He has all his favorite knives and cooking instructions, placed exactly where he wants them. His kitchen is part of his intelligence, of his skills. The same cook working in your kitchen can probably cook better than you do, but he can’t reproduce the same meals he would prepare in his favorite kitchen. We ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with fLaMEd 🔥, whose blog can be found at flamedfury.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? What's going on, Internet? Kia ora, I'm fLaMEd ...

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation. When I finish an agentic session, I get all the outward signs of having written code, but none of the internal processes that happen when we write code by hand . As a quick primer, the human brain has several types of memory, short-term, working, and long-term. Short-term memory gathers information temporarily and processes it quickly, like RAM. Long-term memory includes t...

“But in the end it’s only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass.” ― The Lord of the Rings There aren't many interesting stops on the 4-hour drive from Westport to the Abel Tasman National Park (apart from the overall high New Zealand baseline). However, the T-Rex Tree is a low-key spot I had to check out. Just imagine the Jurassic Park music and a big roar, which I won't share here for copyright reasons. Roaaaaaaaar! The Buller Gorge is an actual touristic s...

All tests were executed against Kafka 4.3.0 using Dimster .  In the last post we used simulated consumer processing time to reveal how important it is to set an appropriate value for max.poll.records to ensure the consumer parallelism that we expect. With a uniform distribution of messages over partitions, the rule of thumb was a value somewhat lower than: group.share.partition.max.record.locks / number of consumers per partition But the...

There is beauty in the moments between arriving and reaching your destination. I felt this yesterday in the moments before attending an event in Edinburgh last night. I had an hour before I needed to arrive and, the day being so warm, I decided to slow down and listen to the world around. I walked through the park with my eyes open under the evening sun for which I had been yearning for months. Every breeze through the air enlivened my senses. Every smile stuck a chord somewhere in my soul. Natu...